Creating a skills-matrix for t-shaped testers

I believe the expression “jack of all trades, master of none” is a misnomer, as I’ve mentioned previously. Being good at two or more complimentary skills is better than being excellent at just one, in my opinion.

But what about being excellent at one skill, and still being good at two or more? Why can’t we be both?

Jason Yip describes a T-shaped person and the benefits that having t-shaped people on teams brings:

A T-shaped person is capable in many things and expert in, at least, one.
As opposed to an expert in one thing (I-shaped) or a “jack of all trades, master of none” generalist, a “t-shaped person” is an expert in at least one thing but also somewhat capable in many other things. An alternate phrase for “t-shaped” is “generalizing specialist”.

image by Jason Yip

Ideally we’d like to have a team of t-shaped testers in Flow Patrol at Automattic. But how do we get to this end goal?

I recently embarked on an exercise to measure and benchmark our skills and do just this with our team. Here’s the steps we took.

Step One – Devise Desired Team Skills

The first thing we did was come up with a list of skills that we have in the team and would like to have in the team. These can be ‘hard’ skills like a specific programming languages and ‘soft’ skills like triaging bugs. In a standard co-located team this would be as easy as conducting a brainstorming session and using affinity grouping to discover these skills. In a distributed environment I wrote a blog post to my team’s channel and had individual members comment with a list of skills they thought appropriate, and then I did the grouping and came up with a draft list of skills and groups.

Step Two – Self-assess against a team skills matrix

Once I had a final list of skills and groups (see below for full list), I put together a matrix (in a Google Spreadsheet) that listed team members on the x-axis, and the skills on the y-axis, and came up with a skill level rating. Our internal systems use a three level scale (Newbie, Comfortable, Expert) which we didn’t think was broad enough so we decided upon five levels:

1. Limited
2. Basic
3. Good
4. Strong
5. Expert

Team Skills Matrix

I hadn’t seen Jason yip’s visual representation at that point in time, otherwise I may have used something like that, which has five similar levels:

Image by Jason Yip

Step Three – Publish results and cross-skill

Once we had the self assessments done we could then publish the data within our organisation and use the benchmark to cross-skill people in the team. In a co-located environment this could involve pair programming, in a distributed one it could involve mentoring and reviewing other team member’s work.

Have you done a skills matrix for your team? How did you do it? What did you discover?

5 thoughts on “Creating a skills-matrix for t-shaped testers”

Man, you keep on bringing great content, thank you. I have been crazy obsessed for T-shaped people for years, I even spoke about it in 2014-15, but you are bringing this to an area I didn’t think could be applied to, remote workers. Thank you for sharing, I really like it and will definitely try it as soon as I get the chance

Ah, I love this for so many reasons! 1) it covers hard and soft skills (and you included the lists you used, which is thoughtful), 2) it gives an examples of real people and the breadth and depth they show, 3) the visuals at the end really work for me. I’m stickying this and sharing it with my team. Thank you!

I like the visual representation you show for demonstrating someone’s progression in understanding of a /thing/. We have used a similar skills matrix to to your Google sheet to look at technical and tool knowledge and then comparing the output with the core needs of the Engineering team so we can identify training needs (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker are fashionable right now).